


Not a Tame Tiger

by nnozomi



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 21:23:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5513771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Varvara does not quite make some propositions. Nightingale does not quite refuse them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not a Tame Tiger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Persiflager](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Persiflager/gifts).



“It’s a shame for you I wasn’t a man, isn’t it?” Varvara greeted him.

Nightingale raised his head from his book. He was spending too much time in the magical library of late, on the pretext—honest enough, certainly—of finding out anything possible about the _Stadtkrone_ magic and its as yet unknown effects to come. It was also, undeniably, a refuge from Peter’s pain and Molly’s wide eyes and the place where Lesley had been.

He took a moment to parse her sentence. “As Constable May’s…erstwhile…example shows, the Folly is no longer barred to women practitioners. Certainly there was no tradition of any such when I was young, but—“

“No, no, I don’t mean that. Sad to say I’m not young enough—or green enough, God knows—for you to take me on as an apprentice, and I wouldn’t have the chutzpah to ask—anyway, I’m pretty used to my own style by now. I don’t expect you’ll grudge me a few little things picked up by observation, though.” She intercepted his pointed glance at her wrist, where the bracelet would be fitted—Peter called it magical house arrest—and grinned. “Come on. We’re neither of us children like your poor apprentices. You don’t expect I’ll spend my whole life in your tidy little birdcage, do you?”

Nightingale sighed. “You propose to become a fugitive from justice?”

“Nothing so strenuous,” she assured him, settling comfortably into the armchair across from the table where he sat. “But the wheel turns and times change, and one day not so long from now who knows where we’ll all be…Anyway, that isn’t what I meant. It’s just a pity you can’t take me to bed, is all.”

Nightingale took his time writing a neat marginal note in a copy of Otto Wagner’s _Baukunst für unserer Zeit_. “While I hate to disappoint you, I am not in the habit of sleeping with material witnesses.”

“Or women,” Varvara agreed, kicking off her pumps and tucking her stockinged feet up under her. “But I wonder who else there is for you sometime. Or me, to be honest. Can you imagine going to bed with someone who thinks the war is something you study for your O-levels?”

“I’m told they call them GCSEs these days,” Nightingale said drily. “Peter has brought me up to date on these things.”

“And you’re not sleeping with _him_ ,” she added, sticking to her theme. “Although he’s quite pretty, isn’t he? I would have snapped him right up if he’d been around in the seventies.”

“He wasn’t born in the seventies, as I’m sure you know. And I was an old man at the time,” Nightingale added, surprising himself.

Varvara laughed. “You look well on it. Do you think there are others like us? Secret survivors of the real thing, trying to act as if they never had their lives slashed in half by the Great Patriotic War?”

“Have you called it that all this time?” Nightingale asked, to keep himself from having to think about the rest of her phrasing.

“Yes, why not? If you ask me, it’s far more apposite here in Britain than back in the motherland—they’ve had other things to worry about since then. You English, your whole national character seems to have rebuilt itself around triumphing over Germany.”

Nightingale looked down at the dense text and sparse monochrome illustrations, knowing his expression would be stricken. No wonder he had found it so easy to withdraw from the changing world after the war, for the long years until the magic began to trickle back again. He couldn’t remember V-E Day clearly, but any victory the Folly had gleaned had been so Pyrrhic that it hardly deserved the name.

“I trust you haven’t actually attempted to seduce Peter?” he said, harking back to her earlier remarks almost at random, anything to change the subject.

Varvara laughed again, the sound improbably free and easy. “Don’t worry. I don’t think I’m his type, and these days if I’m going in for casual sex I prefer to keep well clear of people I meet in the line of business. Pity really, the new breed of police these days have a lot going for them. That other friend of Peter’s, the black girl in the headscarf?” She kissed the tips of her fingers. “Can’t tell you what an improvement. Now you were always a looker, but I thought that was just another way you were an exception.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know the demi-monde has always kept an eye on the Folly as well as the reverse. The last proper wizard in London? Everyone knew the Nightingale. I’d heard about you even before rationing ended, back when you hardly ever came out of your seclusion. I don’t mind telling you I was curious.”

Nightingale thought back to the winter of 1947: dark, cold, cold, dark.

“And when we did see you, over the years,” Varvara continued evenly, “you were growing older—well, so was I, then—and I wondered why all the fuss over an old man who wasn’t anything but a ceremonial magician any more, a relict—yes, English has such wonderful double meanings, doesn’t it? I felt rather bad for you. What does the poet say— _tamed and shabby tigers_? Or Tiger-killers, in your case, I guess. Everything was fading, not just your good looks—“ she tilted her head with a curious mixture of salacity and pathos--“the virtue, all of it.”

 _A relict_ , he repeated to himself.

“And then it started coming back, didn’t it? And I got a few glimpses of what they meant when they used to talk about you.” Uncoiling from the chair in a sudden movement, she began to pace the open space between the bookshelves and the table, still in her stocking feet. “And then—nobody _ever_ gave me the kind of workout you did back at the farmhouse. The Germans had brute power and to spare, but that kind of finesse, control—zero to sixty and back again—they couldn’t touch you.”

“I thought you had concluded it wasn’t worth trying to seduce me,” Nightingale said mildly, a little dizzy from her sudden crackling energy.

“Oh, sure. Anyway, you may know a thing or two in bed, but even so I figure it couldn’t be as much fun as duelling you.” Varvara grinned at him over her shoulder, turned and came to learn on the table across from him.

“I’m flattered,” he said dryly, regaining most of his composure. “Enough to wonder what it is you actually want from me, then.”

“Want…” Molly had brought him a cup of tea and a currant scone perhaps two hours ago; he had drunk the tea while it was still hot, and forgotten the scone. Varvara reached over now and broke off a crumbly fingerful. “Why not just a sparring partner? Come on, tell me: Wouldn’t you enjoy doing that again?”

“You must be out of your mind,” Nightingale said. He moved the plate (the same flower-painted Shentall china that the Folly had used for as long as he could remember) closer to her so that she wouldn’t have to lean past him to finish the scone. “Imagine if I were to go ahead and spar with you, and you caught me in a moment of weakness—“ not that he really found this likely, but it couldn’t be ruled out—“and effected your escape. As well ask Alexander Seawoll to go a round of boxing with a prisoner in the cells.”

Varvara chuckled, wiping crumbs from the corner of her mouth. “Granted. I don’t guess you’d accept my parole…? No, oh well. Maybe I should ask Seawoll--?”

“ _Please_ ,” wincing, “don’t.”

“Oh, very well.” She sighed, seeming to drop again into a lower key. “Then it’s not really a matter of what I want, is it, Nightingale.” Clearly she was using it as title, not name. “We’re thrown into one another’s company for a little while longer, will we or nil we. But I’ve lived long enough that the only thing I really can’t stomach any more is boredom.”

About to say that boredom had always been the least of his problems, Nightingale hesitated. Memory came suddenly, strongly, and blessedly free of the dull constant pain of remembering Ettersberg or the newer, sharper sting of losing Lesley: standing in a half-lit basement entryway and telling Peter, the younger man’s dark face nearly invisible in the dimness, exactly what to do if something came out of there wearing his body. He had been a little frightened, angry with the human monster who had created that hall of horrors, angry with himself for overlooking it—and, undeniably, nerve-singing exhilarated. He had missed riding the crest of that thrill.

No wonder Varvara wanted to try her skill with another duel. The practice ring could never recreate the euphoria of putting your life on the line, of course, but—

Peter would laugh at him, Nightingale the meticulous and risk-averse, nursing this sudden craving—would call him, what, an _adrenaline junkie_? He hadn’t felt that excitement in—had forgotten even to want it, in the long quiet years of lotus-eating. But it was hard to let go of once again.

Varvara was leaning one hip comfortably against the desk, crumbling the remains of the scone into a Xeno’s paradox of pastry fragments and eating them one by one. Her head came up sharply when his did, as if she’d sensed a change in the air.

“You and I,” he said finally, “may have outlived our duty to boredom.”

Her grin met his. “So…?”

Nightingale closed the book on the table with great care, stood up, and walked around to offer his hand to her. She took it, allowing his fingers to close on the cool skin of her wrist where his prisoning bracelet would shortly be clasped. Unscarred—although he was fairly sure she bore scars elsewhere—with the smooth skin of a young woman and the softness of an older one. His fingertips were still blistered from the last session with his apprentices at the forge.

“This way,” he said, not certain yet of whether, outside the library door, he would lead her upstairs to his bed, downstairs to the practice rooms, or somewhere else altogether. It didn’t matter. It would not go too far—neither of them were old enough to throw themselves away for good, not yet—but there would be a moment of the excitement of risking it all.

**Author's Note:**

> A quick treat because your prompts lined up temptingly with some ideas I had about Varvara and Nightingale. I hope you enjoy it.


End file.
